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The American Civil War: A Complete History for Sleep | Rain Sounds | Sleepless History · Sleepless History: Sleep Documentaries

• 0:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Welcome back to Sleepless History.
• 0:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm glad you're here, get comfortable, settle in.
• 0:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Whatever you need to do to find a position that works for you, go ahead and do that now.
• 0:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Tonight we are going to move slowly through one of the most important, most devastating and most consequential stories in all of American history.
• 0:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: We are going to talk about the Civil
• 0:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Not just the battles, they will get to those, not just the famous names, though we'll spend time with them too.
• 0:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: We are going to try as best we can to understand it as a human story, a story of a country that was built on a contradiction so enormous, it could not survive intact.
• 0:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: A story of men and women who lived through something most of us can barely imagine.
• 0:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: A story who's ending in some ways we are still writing.
• 1:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is going to take us a while.
• 1:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: and I want to do it right.
• 1:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: So take a breath, let your shoulders drop and let's begin.
• 1:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you've tuned in tonight to help your mind drift off, you're in the right place, that's the reason I create these.
• 1:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you find this helpful, consider subscribing and leaving a comment about where you're listening from and what the time is.
• 1:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: I love reading through the comments.
• 1:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's something surreal about knowing someone is watching at midnight in San Francisco, while someone else is starting their day in Stockholm, or grabbing a quick lunch in Sydney.
• 1:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chapter 1.
• 1:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: The World Before The War To understand the Civil War, you have to understand the America that existed before it.
• 1:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Not the America of Mythology, the shining city on the hill, the land of freedom and opportunity, the actual America.
• 2:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: The one that was built in no small part, on the labor of enslaved human beings, let's go back to the very beginning of the country, or near enough.
• 2:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: By the time the Constitution was ratified in 1788, slavery was already ancient in the American colonies.
• 2:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: The first enslaved Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619, more than a century and a half before the declaration of independence.
• 2:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: By the time the founders sat down in Philadelphia to build a new nation,
• 2:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: There were roughly 700,000 enslaved people in the United States, concentrated primarily in the south, and the entire economy of that region had been designed around their own paid labour.
• 3:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: The founders knew it was a problem.
• 3:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Many of them said so privately and some said so publicly.
• 3:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thomas Jefferson wrote about slavery with what can only be described as anguished hypocrisy.
• 3:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: He called it a moral wrong.
• 3:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: He called it a firebell in the night.
• 3:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: He also owned over 600 people across his lifetime and freed almost none of them.
• 3:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Constitution itself is full of the fingerprints of slavery.
• 3:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: The three fifths compromise counted each enslaved person as three fifths of a human being for purposes of congressional representation giving southern states more political power than their free population alone would have warranted.
• 3:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: The international slave trade was protected until 1808.
• 3:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Runaway slaves had to be returned to their owners even if they escaped to free states.
• 4:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: So slavery was baked into the structure of the country from the very beginning.
• 4:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: What changed in the early 19th century was not the fact of slavery, but the scale of it.
• 4:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: and the thing that changed that scale was cotton.
• 4:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Before the invention of the cotton gin in 1793, cotton was a difficult crop to process.
• 4:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Separating the cotton fiber from the seeds was enormously time-consuming.
• 4:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: A skilled worker might clean a single pound of cotton in an entire day.
• 4:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Eli Whitney's cotton gin changed all of that.
• 4:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: It could clean 50 pounds in the same time.
• 4:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Suddenly, cotton became wildly profitable.
• 4:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: So then Planta's expanded their operations dramatically, pushing west into Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and eventually Texas.
• 5:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: And as they expanded, they brought the institution of slavery with them.
• 5:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: By 1860, on the eve of the Civil War,
• 5:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: There were nearly 4 million enslaved people in the United States.
• 5:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: 4 million.
• 5:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: That is an almost incomprehensible number.
• 5:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: The cotton, those people produced, accounted for roughly 60% of all American exports.
• 5:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: The wealth it generated flowed not just through the South, but through the entire economy.
• 5:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Northern banks lent money to southern plantas, Northern textile mills, processed southern cotton, New York merchants ensured southern crops.
• 5:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: The entire financial architecture of the United States was built in significant parts on the foundation of enslaved labor.
• 6:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: And here is something worth sitting with for a moment.
• 6:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: The enslaved people themselves were also property, meaning they could be used as collateral for loans.
• 6:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: The bodies of human beings were part of the balance sheets of American banks.
• 6:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: When historians calculate the total value of enslaved people in 1860,
• 6:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: the numbers are staggering.
• 6:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: By some estimates, the monetary value placed on enslaved human beings in the south exceeded the combined value of all the railroads and all the factories in the entire United States.
• 6:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Slavery was not a marginal feature of the American economy.
• 6:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now, not every white southerner owned enslaved people.
• 6:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: In fact, the majority did not.
• 7:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Slaveholding was concentrated among a planter elite.
• 7:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 1860, about a quarter of southern white families, owned at least one enslaved person, about 12% of the entire white southern population, owned 10 or more.
• 7:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: perhaps a few thousand families owned 50 or more, and constituted what historians sometimes call the planter aristocracy.
• 7:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: These were the men who built the grand plantation houses.
• 7:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: who sent their sons to college and their daughters to finishing schools who controlled southern state legislatures and dominated the democratic party.
• 7:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: They were a minority, but they wielded extraordinary power, and they would fight to the last to preserve the system that gave them that power.
• 8:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: But here is the thing that often gets lost.
• 8:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: even white southerners who owned no enslaved people were deeply invested in the institution, psychologically and socially, if not economically, because in a society built on racial slavery, simply being white carried a status that had value.
• 8:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: The most destitute white farmer in the Mississippi Delta was still in the social hierarchy of the South, above every black person, free or enslaved.
• 8:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: To end slavery was, in the minds of many white southerners, not just an economic threat, but an existential one.
• 8:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was a threat to the entire social order.
• 8:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: which had gradually abolished slavery beginning after the Revolution.
• 9:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: By 1804, all northern states had passed some form of emancipation legislation.
• 9:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Though the process was often gradual and some enslaved people remained in the north for decades afterward.
• 9:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: The northern economy was different.
• 9:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was built on free labor, on small farms, on manufacturing, on trade.
• 9:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: Immigration was transforming northern cities.
• 9:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: The ideal of economic mobility, the idea that a man could start poor and work his way up, was central to northern identity.
• 9:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: And into this identity, the existence of slavery fit very uncomfortably.
• 9:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: because it seemed to undermine the whole premise.
• 9:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: How could you have a free labor republic and a slave republic in the same country?
• 9:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: The answer for decades was through compromise.
• 10:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: An almost endless series of compromises designed to postpone the confrontation that everyone knew was coming.
• 10:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: The issue was simple in its mechanics and explosive in its implications.
• 10:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Missouri wanted to enter the Union as a slave state, northern congressman objected.
• 10:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: If Missouri came in as a slave state, the balance of power in the Senate, which was then evenly split between 11 free states.
• 10:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: 11 slave states would tip to the south.
• 10:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: After months of bitter argument, Henry Clay of Kentucky broke at a deal.
• 10:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Missouri would enter as a slave state.
• 10:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Main would be carved out of Massachusetts.
• 10:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: and enter as a free state, maintaining the balance.
• 10:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: And a line would be drawn across the continent at 36 degrees, 30 minutes north latitude, which was roughly Missouri southern border.
• 11:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: North of that line, slavery would be prohibited in any future territories except Missouri itself.
• 11:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: South of it, slavery would be permitted, Thomas Jefferson then in his 70s.
• 11:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: and living in retirement at Monticello, read about the Missouri compromise and was terrified.
• 11:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: He wrote in a letter that the issue, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled him with terror.
• 11:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: He called it the Nell of the Union.
• 11:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: He thought it was a temporary patch on a wound that would eventually prove fatal.
• 11:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was right, though it took 40 years for him to be proven so.
• 11:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: The compromise held for a while, the country expanded.
• 11:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: New states came in, sometimes one-free and one-slave to maintain the balance.
• 12:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Texas, which had broken away from Mexico in 1836 and been an independent republic for nearly a decade, was annexed by the United States in 1845.
• 12:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: It came in as a slave state.
• 12:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: and its annexation contributed to the Mexican-American War, which ended in 1848 with the United States acquiring an enormous stretch of new territory in the West, including what would become California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming.
• 12:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: And suddenly,
• 12:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: What would happen to all this new land?
• 12:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Would slavery be permitted in it?
• 12:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Wilmot Previso, a congressional measure, proposed in 1846, would have banned slavery from all territory acquired from Mexico.
• 13:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: It passed the house, but died in the Senate.
• 13:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: The country was gridlocked, and the 1848 election produced a new crisis.
• 13:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: Enter another compromise.
• 13:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: The compromise of 1850 was Henry Clay's last great act, and it was a more complicated package of deals than the Missouri compromise.
• 13:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: California would enter as a free state.
• 13:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: The rest of the territory from the Mexican session would be organized without any restriction on slavery, leaving the question to be decided by the settlers themselves, a concept that would later be called popular sovereignty.
• 13:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: The slave trade, but not slavery itself, would be abolished in the District of Columbia.
• 13:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: and most controversially, a new and much stronger fugitive slave act would be passed, requiring citizens of northern states to assist in the capture and return of runaway slaves.
• 14:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: That last provision lit a fire in the north.
• 14:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Before the fugitive slave act, most northerners could maintain a comfortable
• 14:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: but the new law made it their problem.
• 14:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Federal commissioners could now demand that ordinary northern citizens participate in the capture of human beings.
• 14:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: And any official who refused to cooperate could be fined.
• 14:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: The law made slavery feel immediate, present, and personal in a way it hadn't before.
• 14:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Into this moment came a novel.
• 14:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Harriet Beach of Stowe published Uncle Tom's cabin in 1852, first as a serial in an abolitionist newspaper and then as a book.
• 15:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: It sold 300,000 copies in its first year in the United States alone.
• 15:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was translated into dozens of languages.
• 15:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: It portrayed the horrors of slavery
• 15:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: specific families, specific scenes of cruelty and separation.
• 15:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: It made readers weep, it made them angry.
• 15:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: When Abraham Lincoln met Harriet Beecher's stove during the war, he reportedly said, so this is the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.
• 15:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Whether he actually said that is debated by historians, but the sentiment captures something real.
• 15:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Uncle Tom's cabin changed the emotional landscape of the slavery debate in the north.
• 15:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Then came Kansas.
• 15:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Kansas Nebraska Act of 1854 was written by Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois.
• 16:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: It organized two new territories, Kansas and Nebraska, from land that was then part of the Louisiana purchase.
• 16:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: and that had been designated free territory under the Missouri Compromise.
• 16:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Douglas's solution was to repeal the Missouri Compromise line and replace it with popular sovereignty, letting the settlers decide.
• 16:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: The idea was to get the railroad built and the territory organized.
• 16:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: What it actually did was tear the political system apart.
• 16:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Within months, Kansas became a battlefield.
• 16:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Pro-slavery settlers flooded in from Missouri.
• 16:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Anti-slavery settlers funded by Northern abolitionists poured in from the other direction.
• 16:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Two rival governments formed, one pro-slavery, and one free, violence erupted, armed bands attack settlements, burned houses, murdered opponents.
• 17:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: In May of 1856,
• 17:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: a pro-slavery mob attacked the free state town of Lawrence, destroying its hotel and newspaper offices.
• 17:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Three days later, a militant abolitionist named John Brown, and four of his sons dragged five pro-slavery settlers from their homes, along Potter-Wattamy Creek, and hacked them to death with broad swords.
• 17:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: The episode became known as the Potter-Wattamy Massacre,
• 17:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Bleeding Kansas was not a metaphor, it was a preview.
• 17:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Kansas also destroyed the wig party, which had been one of the country's two major parties.
• 17:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: The wigs could not hold together over the question of slavery's expansion, and they splinted.
• 17:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Out of the wreckage, a new party was born.
• 18:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Republican Party founded in 1854, explicitly opposed to the expansion of slavery into new territories.
• 18:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Its first presidential candidate was John Fremont in 1856.
• 18:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: He lost to Democrat James Buchanan, but he carried 11 of 16 free states.
• 18:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: the Republicans were not going away.
• 18:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Meanwhile, the Supreme Court issued a ruling that may be the most catastrophic in its history.
• 18:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Dred Scott vs. Sanford was decided in March of 1857.
• 18:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Dred Scott was an enslaved man who had lived for years in the free state of Illinois and the free territory of Wisconsin with his in-slaver, an army surgeon named John
• 18:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: After Emerson's death, Scott sued for his freedom, arguing that his residence in free territory had made him free.
• 19:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: The case wound its way through the courts for years and finally reached the Supreme Court.
• 19:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chief Justice Roger Taney, a Marylander and devoted defender of slavery, wrote the majority opinion.
• 19:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was a sweeping catastrophe.
• 19:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Taney ruled that Scott had no right to sue in federal court at all, because black people, whether enslaved or free, were not citizens of the United States and could never become citizens.
• 19:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: He went further.
• 19:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: He ruled that Congress had never had the constitutional authority to prohibit slavery in any territory.
• 19:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: which meant the Missouri compromise had always been unconstitutional, which meant slavery could legally follow settlers anywhere in the country.
• 19:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Northerners were horrified.
• 20:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: The decision seemed to mean that slavery could not be restricted anywhere, that it could potentially spread into free states themselves.
• 20:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: The ruling did not resolve the slavery question.
• 20:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: It poured gasoline on it, and then came John Brown again.
• 20:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: On the night of October 16th, 1859.
• 20:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Brown led a group of 21 men, Black and White, on a raid on the federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry in Virginia, which is now West Virginia.
• 20:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: His plan, which was always more vision than strategy, was to seize the weapons, arm enslaved people in the surrounding region.
• 20:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: and trigger a general uprising.
• 20:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: The raid was quickly suppressed by federal troops under the command of Colonel Robert E. Lee.
• 20:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Two of Brown's sons were killed.
• 20:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Brown himself was wounded, captured, tried for trees and against Virginia, and hanged on December 2nd, 1859.
• 21:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: The reaction
• 21:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the north, many people who condemned the raid itself still admired Brown's courage and conviction.
• 21:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Ralph Waldo Emerson said Brown would make the gallows glorious like the cross.
• 21:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Henry David The Road compared him to Jesus.
• 21:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Abolishness newspapers printed tributes.
• 21:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Bell's rang in northern cities on the day of his execution.
• 21:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the south, the reaction was pure terror.
• 21:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was proof of what they had always feared, organized northern support for slave rebellion.
• 21:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was what republican politics, in southern eyes, actually meant.
• 21:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Never mind that the Republican Party had nothing to do with Brown and officially condemned the raid.
• 22:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: The South was not in a mood for fine distinctions.
• 22:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: By 1860, the country was a powder keg.
• 22:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Democratic Party, which had been the main national institution holding the country together, held its nominating convention in Charleston, South Carolina, in April of that year.
• 22:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: and promptly destroyed itself.
• 22:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Southern delegates walked out when the convention refused to include an explicit federal guarantee of slavery in the territories in the party platform.
• 22:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Northern Democrats nominated Stephen Douglas on a popular sovereignty platform.
• 22:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Southern Democrats nominated John Breckenridge of Kentucky.
• 22:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: on an explicit pro-slavery platform, a fourth candidate, John Bell of Tennessee, ran on the Constitutional Union ticket, which was essentially a platform of refusing to take any position at all, and hoping the crisis would somehow resolve itself.
• 23:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Into this fractured field, stepped Abraham Lincoln, the Republican candidate, Lincoln was
• 23:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: a self-taught lawyer who had grown up in poverty in Kentucky and Indiana, a man who had made his name in a series of debates with Stephen Douglas in 1858 that had given him a national profile.
• 23:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lincoln was not an abolitionist.
• 23:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: He did not, in 1860, support ending slavery, where it already existed.
• 23:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: He did oppose its expansion into new territories.
• 23:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: He believed slavery was a moral wrong that should be put on the path to ultimate extinction, but he was willing to let it die slowly.
• 23:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the states where it already existed, if that was what it took to hold the country together, it didn't matter.
• 24:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: to the South, Lincoln's election meant the end of everything they valued.
• 24:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: On November 6th, 1860, Abraham Lincoln won the presidential election, without carrying a single southern state.
• 24:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: He received less than 40% of the popular vote nationwide, but a majority of the electoral college.
• 24:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: He would be inaugurated on March 4, 1861.
• 24:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: The question was whether there would still be a union for him to lead by then.
• 24:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: There would not be quite.
• 24:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chapter 2.
• 24:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Nation breaks.
• 24:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: South Carolina did not wait.
• 24:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: On December 20, 1860, just six weeks after Lincoln's election, a convention of South Carolina delegates voted unanimously to dissolve the state's bonds with the United States of America.
• 25:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: The ordinance of succession was adopted in a single afternoon.
• 25:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: That evening, the streets of Charleston erupted in celebration, cannons fired, bands played, men made speeches, a reporter for the Charleston Mercury wrote that the city was one great bonfire of joy.
• 25:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is worth pausing here to think about what that joy means.
• 25:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: These were people who genuinely believed they were doing something righteous and necessary.
• 25:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: They were not in their own minds the villains of this story.
• 25:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: They were defenders of their homes, their families, their way of life.
• 25:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: their civilization.
• 25:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: The South Carolina Declaration of Session issued a few days later, makes the reason clear in direct language.
• 26:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Its site's Lincoln's election and the northern state's resistance to the fugitive slave act, it says explicitly that the United States
• 26:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: that South Carolina was leaving because of the increasing hostility of the non-slave holding states to the institution of slavery.
• 26:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: The document uses the word slavery or slave or enslaved dozens of times.
• 26:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: There is no ambiguity about the cause.
• 26:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Mississippi followed on January 9th,
• 26:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Alabama on January 11th, Georgia on January 19th, Louisiana on January 26th, Texas on February 1st, 7 states in six weeks and Lincoln hadn't even been inaugurated yet.
• 27:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: The debates in those state conventions are fascinating and sometimes heartbreaking to read.
• 27:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: a long time congressman and close friend of Abraham Lincoln gave an impassioned speech against the session.
• 27:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: He argued that Georgia had no just cause to leave the union.
• 27:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: That Lincoln's election did not buy itself constitute any threat to slavery in Georgia.
• 27:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: That the union was worth more than any temporary grievance.
• 27:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: He lost the argument.
• 27:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Georgia
• 27:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Alexander Stevens accepted the position of Vice President of the Confederacy.
• 27:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: The man who had argued most eloquently against the session became the second highest official of the new Confederate government.
• 27:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: His inaugural address, as Vice President, delivered in Savannah, Georgia on March 21, 1861.
• 28:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: is one of the most extraordinary documents of the era.
• 28:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: He laid out with unusual candor what the Confederacy was founded to preserve.
• 28:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: He said, the Confederate government was founded on the Great Truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man, and that slavery subordination to the superior race.
• 28:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: his natural and normal condition.
• 28:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: He said this was the cornerstone of the Confederacy, and so his speech became known as the cornerstone speech.
• 28:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: He said the founders of the United States had been wrong.
• 28:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: to think slavery was a temporary institution that would fade away.
• 28:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Confederacy, he said, was founded on the opposite premise.
• 28:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Confederate States of America was formally established in February of 1861.
• 29:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: at a convention in Montgomery, Alabama.
• 29:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Jefferson Davis of Mississippi was chosen as its provisional president, more by political calculation than by popular enthusiasm.
• 29:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Davis was not the most dynamic or beloved figure in the Confederacy, but he was a former United States Secretary of War, a West Point graduate,
• 29:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: a combat veteran of the Mexican-American War and a United States senator.
• 29:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: He had the credentials the new nation felt it needed.
• 29:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Davis was a complicated man.
• 29:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was rigid, proud, sensitive to criticism, frequently ill, and often quarrel with his generals.
• 29:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: He believed deeply in states' rights as a political principle, which made him an occasionally awkward president of a centralized war government.
• 30:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was devoted to the Confederacy with everything he had, whether the Confederacy was better or worse off for his leadership.
• 30:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: is something historians have argued about ever since.
• 30:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: While all of this was happening, there was still a United States of America, and it had a president, James Buchanan, who had about four months left in office, and absolutely no idea what to do.
• 30:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Buchanan believed Session was illegal, but also believed he had no constitutional authority to do anything about it.
• 30:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: issued statements condemning succession.
• 30:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: He watched as Confederate forces seized federal forts, arsenals, and customs houses throughout the south.
• 30:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: He did essentially nothing.
• 30:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: There was one place where a small contingent of federal forces held on, and that was
• 31:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: It sat on an artificial island in the middle of the harbour and had been under construction for years.
• 31:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was not yet complete when secession happened.
• 31:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: The United States Army Garrison there, about 80 men.
• 31:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: under the command of Major Robert Anderson, found themselves suddenly occupying federal territory in the middle of what was now claiming to be a foreign country.
• 31:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Anderson had actually moved his men from Fort Maltry on the mainland shore to Fort Sumter in late December of 1860, which he felt was more defensible.
• 31:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: South Carolina was furious at what it considered a provocative
• 31:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Confederate forces began surrounding the fort with batteries of artillery, the standoff began.
• 31:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the weeks between Lincoln's inauguration on March 4th, and the bombardments of Fort Sumter,
• 32:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: the new president faced an impossible situation.
• 32:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: If he abandoned Fort Sumter, he would be tacitly recognizing the Confederacy's right to seize federal property.
• 32:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: If he sent warships to resupply it, he risked starting a war.
• 32:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: He chose a middle path.
• 32:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: He informed Governor Francis Pickens of South Carolina that he was sending an unarmed supply ship, carrying only food, not weapons.
• 32:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: the decision forced the Confederacy's hand.
• 32:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: If Confederate forces opened fire on a union supply ship, they would clearly be the aggressors.
• 32:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: If they let it through, they would be allowing the United States to resupply a fort in the middle of their harbor indefinitely.
• 32:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: Confederate President Jefferson Davis made his decision.
• 33:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: he ordered general PGT, Bohr regard, commanding Confederate forces in Charleston, to demand fought Sumpter's surrender and, if Anderson refused, to open fire.
• 33:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Anderson refused.
• 33:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: At 430 in the morning on April 12th, 1861, the first Confederate shell arced out over
• 33:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: The civil war had begun.
• 33:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: The bombardment went on for 34 hours.
• 33:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Anderson and his men fired back, but they were vastly outnumbered and outgunned and running low on supplies.
• 33:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: On April 14th, Anderson surrendered.
• 33:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Confederate forces had taken a federal thought, but remarkably, no one had been killed in the bombardment itself.
• 33:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Two Union soldiers died in an accidental explosion during the surrender ceremony, becoming the first fatalities of the Civil War, the news spread across the country in hours carried by telegraph.
• 34:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the north, the reaction was a surge of patriotic fury,
• 34:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lincoln had already been working on a response.
• 34:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: On April 15th, he issued a proclamation calling for 75,000 state militia volunteers to serve for 90 days to suppress what he called combinations.
• 34:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings.
• 34:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: He called it a rebellion, not a war, a choice with significant legal implications.
• 34:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: He never once recognized the Confederacy as a legitimate government.
• 34:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: The call for troops forced a decision on the states of the Upper South
• 35:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Virginia, the most populous and historically significant southern state, had been divided.
• 35:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: There were Virginians who were deeply opposed to secession, particularly in the western mountain counties, where slavery was uncommon and ties to the north were stronger.
• 35:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: But Lincoln's call for troops to fight against the south made continued neutrality impossible
• 35:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: On April 17th, Virginia voted to succeed, pending ratification by voters.
• 35:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was the Confederacy's greatest prize.
• 35:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Richmond, Virginia, became the new Confederate capital in May.
• 35:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Virginia's cessation also brought the most important military figure of the war's early years into Confederate service.
• 35:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Robert Edward Lee was 54 years old in April of 1861.
• 36:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was widely considered the finest officer in the United States Army.
• 36:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: General Windfield Scott, the army's aging commanding general, told Lincoln that Lee was worth 50,000 men.
• 36:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lee had been offered command of the primary union army.
• 36:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: He declined.
• 36:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: He wrote in a letter that they were posed to secession and deploring war.
• 36:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: He could take no part in an invasion of the southern states.
• 36:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: His loyalty was to Virginia.
• 36:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: He resigned his commission in the United States Army, and within days accepted command of Virginia's military forces, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina also succeeded in May and June of 1861.
• 36:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: eleven states in all left the Union.
• 36:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Four slave states stayed.
• 37:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware.
• 37:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lincoln worked desperately to keep them.
• 37:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was especially anxious about Maryland, which surrounded Washington on three sides.
• 37:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: If Maryland seceded, the capital would be completely isolated within Confederate territory.
• 37:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lincoln suspended habeas corpus in Maryland, arrested secessionist members of the state legislature, and essentially used martial law to keep the state in the union.
• 37:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was constitutionally questionable and politically ruthless, and it worked.
• 37:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: refused to follow Richmond.
• 37:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: They organized their own government, loyal to the Union, and were eventually admitted to the Union as the separate state of West Virginia in 1863.
• 37:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is the only state to have been created by Session from another state during the war.
• 38:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: So by the summer
• 38:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: 11 states with a population of about 9 million, of whom roughly 3 and a half million were enslaved.
• 38:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Faced the United States of America, 23 states with a population of about 22 million, the vast majority of whom were free.
• 38:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: In terms of industrial capacity, railroad mileage, financial resources, and sheer numbers of men of fighting age,
• 38:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Confederacy had some things in its favour too.
• 38:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was fighting a defensive war on its own ground.
• 38:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: It would be easier for the Confederacy to simply survive than for the Union to conquer it, and it had the better generals, at least in the beginning.
• 39:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Neither side had any idea what was coming.
• 39:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: one and 1862.
• 39:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: There was a belief, widespread on both sides in the summer of 1861, that the war would be short.
• 39:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Northern newspapers talked about crushing the rebellion in a matter of weeks.
• 39:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Confederate leaders predicted that the superior character and fighting spirit of southern men
• 39:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: The word on both sides was that one big battle would settle it.
• 39:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: They were about to get their battle.
• 39:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Congressmen and Senators from Washington, civilians from the city, journalists, well-dressed men and women who had come out to observe history.
• 40:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: packed their carriages and rode south from the capital in mid-July of 1861.
• 40:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: They brought picnic baskets and field glasses.
• 40:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: They were going to watch the United States Army crush the confederate forces at a creek called Bullrun near the town of Manassas Junction in Virginia
• 40:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: it would be a spectacle they thought.
• 40:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: A demonstration of union power.
• 40:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: Afterward, perhaps the rebellion would collapse.
• 40:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: The first battle of bull run was fought on July 21st, 1861.
• 40:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: The union army under general Irvin McDowell,
• 40:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: outnumbered the Confederate forces under General Beauregard, the same man who had commanded at Fort Sumter.
• 40:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: McDowell's plan was reasonable, and for much of the morning the Union forces seemed to be winning.
• 41:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Confederate line was pushed back.
• 41:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: There was a moment when it looks like the collapse might actually come.
• 41:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then, a Virginia general named Thomas Jackson stood his brigade on a hill and refused to give ground, rallying the wavering confederate line.
• 41:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Another officer pointed at him and shouted to his men that there was Jackson standing like a stone wall, rally behind the Virginians.
• 41:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: The name, stuck.
• 41:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thomas Jackson became Stonewall Jackson that day.
• 41:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: and the Confederate line held.
• 41:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: By mid-afternoon, the Confederate forces reinforced by troops that had arrived by rail counter-attack.
• 41:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: the union line broke, and it did not break in an orderly retreat.
• 41:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: It shattered.
• 41:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Soldiers threw down their weapons and ran.
• 41:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Officers could not control their men.
• 42:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: The road back to Washington became clogged with a panicked mass of soldiers, civilians, overturned carriages, horses, and supply wagons.
• 42:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: The spectators fled along with the army.
• 42:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: By nightfall, the whole disorganized mass had poured back into Washington.
• 42:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was, by any measure, a humiliating route.
• 42:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Both North and South drew lessons from Bullrun, though not always the same ones.
• 42:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the Confederacy, the victory seemed to confirm the belief in southern military superiority.
• 42:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some Confederate leaders thought the Union might simply give up.
• 42:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the north, the shock was profound but ultimately galvanizing.
• 42:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lincoln knew now that this would be a real war, a long war, a hard war.
• 42:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: He began to think about who could actually lead the Union Army through it.
• 43:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: He found, at first, George Brinton McLean.
• 43:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: McClellan was 34 years old, a West Point graduate, a hero of the Mexican-American War, and a man of genuine military talent.
• 43:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was also vain, overly cautious, and deeply political, Lincoln gave him command of what became the Army of the Potomac.
• 43:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: and McClellan threw himself into organising and training the raw recruits with impressive energy.
• 43:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: By the winter of 1861, he had built a formidable force.
• 43:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: He simply could not bring himself to use it.
• 43:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lincoln pushed McClellan to advance.
• 43:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: McClellan always had a reason not to.
• 43:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: His intelligence estimates, which were wildly inflated by the flamboyant and unreliable detective Alan Pinkerton, told him he was always outnumbered even when he vastly outnumbered his confederate opponent, spring came and Lincoln all-but-ordered McLean interaction.
• 44:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: The peninsula campaign of 1862 was McLean's great offensive.
• 44:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Rather than marching overland directly south to Richmond, McLean transported his enormous army by sea to the Virginia Peninsula, the finger of land between the York and James Rivers, and began a slow advance up the peninsula toward the Confederate capital.
• 44:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: He had over 100,000 men,
• 44:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: He inched forward with a elaborate caution, convinced that every step that he was about to be overwhelmed by superior Confederate forces.
• 44:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: At Yorktown, seen of the last great battle of the Revolutionary War.
• 44:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: A confederate force of much smaller size under general John Magruder bluffed McLean into a month-long siege by marching the same units past the same gap in the trees over and over again, creating the impression of a vast army.
• 45:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: McLean called for reinforcements.
• 45:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: The siege dragged on.
• 45:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Magruder was buying time for the Confederacy.
• 45:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: By late spring, McLean's army was within a few miles of Richmond.
• 45:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: He could hear the church bells in the Confederate capital.
• 45:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Victory seemed close.
• 45:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then, Robert E. Lee took command of the Confederate army of northern Virginia and everything changed.
• 45:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lee had spent the first part of the war in a frustrating, administrative role in Richmond.
• 45:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: He had been criticised in the press for his cautious strategy in Western Virginia.
• 46:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Nobody quite understood yet what he was capable of, what he was capable of was audacity on a scale that McClellan could not imagine.
• 46:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Seven Days battles fought from June 25 to July 1st of 1862 were a series of engagements in which Lee essentially seized the initiative from McLean and never gave it back.
• 46:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lee's tactics were sometimes clumsy and his coordination poor.
• 46:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: His subordinate generals, including the brilliant but erratic Stonewall Jackson, often failed to execute his orders at the right moment.
• 46:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Confederates suffered more casualties than the Union in many of the individual engagements.
• 46:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: None of that mattered.
• 46:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: What mattered was that Lee attacked, constantly and aggressively, and McLean retreated, convinced he was about to be destroyed.
• 47:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: By July 1862, the peninsula campaign was over.
• 47:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Union Army had been pushed back to a fortified base on the James River.
• 47:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: Richmond was safe.
• 47:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: McClellan, in a letter to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, blamed everyone but himself for the failure and suggested that if the army were destroyed, the blame would rest on Lincoln's administration.
• 47:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was an astonishing letter to send to his commander in chief, and it did not improve his standing with Lincoln.
• 47:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: The war in the west was going better for the union.
• 47:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: In
• 47:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: A previously obscure general named Ulysses Grant had captured two important Confederate forts in Tennessee, Fort Henry, and Fort Donelson, and had forced the unconditional surrender of a Confederate force of nearly 15,000 men.
• 48:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was the largest capture of Confederate troops to that point, and it opened the Confederate Heartland to Union invasion.
• 48:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Grant became famous overnight.
• 48:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: His initials led to a new nickname, unconditional surrender grant.
• 48:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: But in April of 1862, Grant's army was nearly destroyed at the Battle of Shiloh in southwestern Tennessee.
• 48:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: The confederate army of Tennessee, under General's Albert Sydney Johnston and Beauregard,
• 48:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Union forces were caught completely unprepared.
• 48:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Johnston had achieved total surprise.
• 48:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: The fighting was savage, with men dying in a spot that became known as the Hornets Nest, where Union soldiers fired so many valleys that the sound was compared to an enormous beehive.
• 48:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Johnston himself was killed that afternoon.
• 49:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: One of the most capable generals the Confederacy had, bleeding to death from a wound to the leg that would have been easily treatable if anyone had noticed it in time.
• 49:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: By nightfall of the first day, the Union forces had been pushed back nearly to the river.
• 49:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Grant later wrote that he walked among his wounded men seeking shelter from the rain.
• 49:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: and that the scenes in the field hospital were so terrible he could not bear to stay.
• 49:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: He slept under a tree, despite the rain.
• 49:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: A colleague found him there and said he
• 49:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Grant said he was, but not in that direction.
• 49:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: The next morning, reinforced by fresh troops, he counter-attacked and drove the Confederates from the field.
• 49:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: Shiloh killed nearly 24,000 men in two days and shocked both sides.
• 50:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: The word Shiloh itself is a Hebrew term often translated as
• 50:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the American memory, after April of 1862, it would mean something else entirely.
• 50:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lincoln was under pressure to relieve Grant after Shiloh, with critics claiming he had been caught off guard and that the army could have been destroyed.
• 50:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lincoln reportedly said he couldn't spare Grant.
• 50:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: He fought.
• 50:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: The comment, whether precisely accurate or not, captures something real about how Lincoln was beginning to think about the kind of general he needed.
• 50:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the summer of 1862, Lee invaded the north for the first time, moving the army of Northern Virginia into Maryland.
• 50:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: He had several objectives.
• 51:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: He wanted to relieve pressure on Virginia.
• 51:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Give the state's farmers a chance to harvest their crops unmolested, possibly secure foreign recognition for the Confederacy, and perhaps encourage Maryland to join the rebellion.
• 51:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: He wrote to Jefferson Davis that a Confederate victory on northern soil might be the decisive blow that ended the war.
• 51:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: By chance, one of the most remarkable accidents in military history occurred.
• 51:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Near the town of Frederick Maryland on September 13th, a union corporal named Barton Mitchell
• 51:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: had recently been.
• 51:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Inside the paper were three cigars.
• 51:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Rapt around the cigars was a copy of Lee's special orders number 191.
• 51:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: His complete operational orders for the Maryland campaign, including the disposition of every division of his army.
• 52:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Someone somehow had dropped them.
• 52:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: McClellan had leased entire plan.
• 52:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: McClellan's response to this gift was, characteristically, to move with extreme slowness.
• 52:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: He spent 16 hours doing essentially nothing with information that should have sent him racing to exploit the Confederate army's dispersed positions.
• 52:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lee somehow learned that his orders had been found, and he scrambled to concentrate his forces.
• 52:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: The resulting battle fought on September 17, 1862, along a small creek called Antietam near the town of Sharpsburg, Maryland.
• 52:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: would become the single bloodiest day in American history.
• 52:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: Twenty-three thousand men were killed, wounded, or captured in a single day.
• 53:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Twenty-three thousand.
• 53:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 12 hours of fighting, the army of the Potomac launched three separate attacks.
• 53:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Each one against a different part of Lee's line.
• 53:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: But never simultaneously.
• 53:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: never in the coordinated manner that would have overwhelmed the Confederate defense.
• 53:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lee held on.
• 53:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: At days end, both armies remained in their positions.
• 53:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: The next day, they faced each other across the field of the dead.
• 53:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lee stayed an extra day, almost daring McClellan to attack again, and then withdrew back across the Potomac into Virginia.
• 53:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Technically, Antietam was a union victory because Lee had left Maryland.
• 53:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Strategically,
• 53:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was something closer to a draw.
• 53:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Tactically, it was a catastrophe for both sides, though the union had the resources to absorb the losses and lead it not.
• 54:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: And politically, for Lincoln, it was enough.
• 54:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lincoln had been working on a document for months.
• 54:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: He had shown it to his cabinet in July, and his secretary of state, William Seward, had advised him to wait for a military victory before issuing it, because otherwise it might look like a desperate move, the last gasp of a failing war effort.
• 54:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Antietam was not a glorious victory, but it was enough.
• 54:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lee had been stopped and turned back, that would do.
• 54:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: On September 22nd, 1862.
• 54:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lincoln issued the preliminary emancipation proclamation.
• 54:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: He gave the Confederate states until January 1st, 1863, to return to the Union.
• 54:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: If they did not, he would declare their enslaved people,
• 55:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chapter 4, the Immancipation Proclamation.
• 55:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: On January 1st, 1863.
• 55:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Abraham Lincoln sat down at a table in the White House and prepared to sign the final emancipation proclamation.
• 55:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: His hand was shaking, not from hesitation, he told those around him, but from hours of hand shaking at a new year's reception.
• 55:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: He paused.
• 55:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: He said he did not want his signature to look tremulous, because people would say he had been uncertain.
• 55:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Then he signed his full name, Abraham Lincoln, in a clear, deliberate hand.
• 55:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let's take a moment to think carefully about what the emancipation proclamation actually did, because it is frequently misunderstood, both by those who celebrate it without reservation, and by those who dismiss it as insufficient.
• 56:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: The proclamation declared
• 56:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: that all persons held the slaves within any state in rebellion against the United States, shall be, then, then forward and forever free.
• 56:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: It applied only to Confederate states, not to the border states still in the Union, Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri, which still had enslaved people.
• 56:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: It did not apply to areas of Confederate states,
• 56:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: that were already under Union Control, like much of Louisiana and parts of Virginia and Tennessee.
• 56:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: So on January 1st, 1863, the proclamation did not, in the literal sense, free a single enslaved person who was not already in a position to free themselves by crossing into Union lines.
• 56:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Critics both at the time and since have pointed to this as evidence of cynicism or weakness, that Lincoln freed only the slaves he had no power to free and kept in bondage the ones he could have freed with a stroke of the pen.
• 57:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: there is something to this criticism.
• 57:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lincoln was a cutely conscious of keeping the border states in the union and emancipating enslaved people in those states might have pushed them toward the Confederacy.
• 57:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was working within political and constitutional constraints that were very real, but the criticism misses the larger significance.
• 57:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: The emancipation proclamation
• 57:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: First, it changed the character of the war.
• 57:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Before January 1st, 1863, the official Union War aim was the restoration of the Union, nothing more, nothing less.
• 58:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: After that date, the Union was fighting for something larger, the end of slavery.
• 58:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: This gave the war a moral dimension that it had lacked officially.
• 58:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: even if many union soldiers and much of the northern public understood from the beginning that slavery was at the heart of the conflict.
• 58:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Second, it changed the status of black men in the union army.
• 58:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: The proclamation explicitly called for the enrolment of black men as soldiers.
• 58:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Black men had been trying to enlist since the beginning of the war and had been turned away.
• 58:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: After the proclamation, the United States coloured troops were organised and by the end of the war, roughly 180,000 Black men had served in the Union Army and another 20,000 in the Navy.
• 59:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: They fought in every theatre of the war.
• 59:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: they suffered higher casualty rates in part because they were given the most dangerous assignments and their service fundamentally changed the meaning of the conflict and eventually the political argument.
• 59:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: for citizenship and rights.
• 59:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Third, and perhaps most immediately consequential, the proclamation destroyed any realistic chance of European intervention in the war on the Confederacy side.
• 59:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Britain and France had been watching the conflict carefully.
• 59:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Confederate government had been lobbying intensively for diplomatic recognition, and there were powerful economic interests in both countries tied to the cotton trade that wanted the blockade broken and trade restored.
• 59:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some British officials were sympathetic to the Confederacy as a matter of balance of power politics, preferring a divided America to a powerful United One.
• 1:00:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: had a profound aversion to slavery.
• 1:00:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: The British had abolished the slave trade in 1807, and slavery itself throughout the British Empire in 1833.
• 1:00:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: The memory of that moral achievement was fresh and powerful.
• 1:00:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: The moment the American war became explicitly a war over slavery as opposed to a constitutional dispute about succession.
• 1:00:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: made intervention politically impossible.
• 1:00:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: There were huge public meetings in British cities, attended by working-class people who had the most economic interest in cheap cotton, explicitly supporting the union cause as a cause against slavery.
• 1:00:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: A British government
• 1:01:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: would have faced enormous popular opposition at home.
• 1:01:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: This was not a small thing.
• 1:01:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Confederate strategy had always assumed that King Cotton would force European intervention.
• 1:01:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: If Britain and France had recognized the Confederacy, the diplomatic consequences could have been severe for the Union.
• 1:01:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: The emancipation proclamation effectively took that card off the table.
• 1:01:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: It also changed the war for the enslaved people themselves.
• 1:01:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Word of the proclamation spread through the slave quarters of the south, with remarkable speed carried by whispered conversations and by the covert networks of communication that enslaved people had always maintained.
• 1:01:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: enslaved men and women had been following the war closely from the beginning.
• 1:01:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Understanding, even when Northern leaders denied it, that their freedom was bound up in its outcome.
• 1:02:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: As Union armies advanced, enslaved people fled toward them in increasing numbers.
• 1:02:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: They had always been doing so, but the proclamation gave it new urgency and new meaning.
• 1:02:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: They were not just escaping.
• 1:02:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: They were liberating themselves, participating actively in the war's central drama.
• 1:02:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: General Benjamin Butler, commanding Union forces at Fort Monroe, in Virginia,
• 1:02:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: in the early months of the war had come up with a legal argument for refusing to return runaway enslaved people to their confederate owners.
• 1:02:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: He called them contraband of war, subject to seizure as enemy property being used to support the Confederate war effort.
• 1:02:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: The term stuck and the tens of thousands of people who streamed into union lines throughout the war were called contraband.
• 1:03:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was a dehumanizing legal fiction, but it was also the legal opening through which an enormous movement poured.
• 1:03:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: The emancipation proclamation replaced the fiction with a declaration.
• 1:03:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: For Abraham Lincoln himself, the proclamation represented an evolution in his thinking.
• 1:03:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lincoln had grown up in a world that most white people, including most anti-slavery white people, took for granted
• 1:03:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: the inferiority of black Americans.
• 1:03:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: He had said things in debates with Stephen Douglas that modern ears find shocking.
• 1:03:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: He had said he did not believe in social and political equality between black and white people.
• 1:03:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: He had at various points supported the idea of colonization, the voluntary migration of freed black people to Africa or Central America, as a solution to what he and many others called the race problem.
• 1:04:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was not at the beginning of the war, a man whose views on race were more enlightened than those of his time and place.
• 1:04:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: but Lincoln learned.
• 1:04:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: He had conversations that changed his thinking.
• 1:04:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Frederick Douglass, who met with him in the White House in August of 1863.
• 1:04:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: came away with a respect for Lincoln that surprised even Douglas himself.
• 1:04:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: He wrote that Lincoln was the first great man that I talked with in the United States freely, who in no single instance reminded me of the difference between himself and myself, of the difference of color.
• 1:04:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lincoln in turn was moved by Douglas and by the arguments Douglas and others made.
• 1:04:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: the growth in Lincoln's thinking over the four years of the war was genuine and significant.
• 1:05:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: The proclamation was also a recognition of practical military reality.
• 1:05:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Slavery was the backbone of the Confederate War effort.
• 1:05:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: Inslaved people, built fortifications, drove supply wagons, cooked for Confederate armies, and performed the agricultural labor that fed Confederate soldiers and their families.
• 1:05:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Every enslaved person who escaped to Union lines was one fewer laborer for the Confederate war machine and one more potential soldier or laborer for the Union.
• 1:05:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Wekening the institution of slavery was a military strategy as well as a moral declaration.
• 1:05:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: When Lincoln signed the emancipation
• 1:05:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: There were celebrations in African American communities across the north.
• 1:05:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: In churches, in meeting halls, in parlors, people gathered to pray and sing and weep.
• 1:06:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: They understood what the document meant, perhaps better than anyone.
• 1:06:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: It did not yet mean freedom for the 4 million people still in bondage.
• 1:06:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: But it meant that the United States government had staked its honour on achieving that freedom.
• 1:06:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was a promise that would not be easily retracted.
• 1:06:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chapter 5 1863 the turning point.
• 1:06:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: The summer of 1863 contains two battles that together determined the outcome of the war,
• 1:06:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: though no one could have known it at the time, and the war would drag on for nearly two more years.
• 1:06:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: They happened almost simultaneously in wildly different landscapes and they both ended on the same day the 4th of July in an almost two perfect symmetry of fate.
• 1:07:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let us begin with Gettysburg.
• 1:07:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Robert E. Lee invaded the north for the second time in June
• 1:07:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: His reasons were similar to his first invasion of Maryland, the previous fall.
• 1:07:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: relieve pressure on Virginia, feed his army on northern soil, threaten northern cities, and perhaps deliver the decisive blow that would break the north's will to continue fighting.
• 1:07:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: The political situation in the north was more fragile than it might have looked from Richmond.
• 1:07:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: There was a serious peace movement concentrated in the Democratic Party.
• 1:07:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: that argued for an negotiated end to the war.
• 1:07:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lincoln faced a difficult reelection campaign in 1864.
• 1:07:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: A great Confederate victory on northern soil might tip the balance.
• 1:07:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lee had also recently won his greatest victory.
• 1:08:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: At Chancellor'sville, Virginia, in the first days of May 1863,
• 1:08:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lee had faced an army of the Potomac that outnumbered his force nearly 2-1 under a new commander, General Joseph Hooker.
• 1:08:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lee had divided his army in defiance of every principle of conventional military caution and sent Stonewall Jackson on a march around the entire Union flank.
• 1:08:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Jackson's core crashed into the Union right flank, with devastating effect at the end of a day of fighting and nearly destroyed the army.
• 1:08:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was perhaps Lee's most brilliant tactical operation of the entire war, but Jackson did not survive it.
• 1:08:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: returning from a late night reconnaissance on May 2nd, Jackson was shot by his own men in the confusion and darkness.
• 1:09:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was struck three times, lost his left arm to amputation and developed pneumonia.
• 1:09:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: He died eight days later, on May 10th, 1863.
• 1:09:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lee, who was devoted to Jackson, said he had lost
• 1:09:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Confederacy had lost its most effective offensive commander, and nothing and no one would fully replace him.
• 1:09:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lee reorganized his army into three corps and moved north.
• 1:09:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: By late June, he was in Pennsylvania.
• 1:09:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: His cavalry commander, the dashing and unreliable, James U.L.
• 1:09:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Brown's Stuart, had ridden off on an extended raid around the Union Army and was out of contact, leaving Lee blind, unable to locate the army of the Potomac.
• 1:09:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: This failure by Stuart to provide intelligence would have enormous consequences.
• 1:09:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: The battle began, not with a grand, strategic maneuver.
• 1:10:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: but with an accident.
• 1:10:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: On the morning of July 1st, a confederate division searching the town of Gettysburg for shoes, of which the confederate army was chronically short, ran into Union Cavalry west of town.
• 1:10:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Cavalry?
• 1:10:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Dismounted?
• 1:10:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: and using new repeating rifles, fought well enough to buy time for union infantry to arrive.
• 1:10:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Both sides fed more and more troops into the fight through the morning, and by afternoon, the battle had escalated far beyond what anyone had planned.
• 1:10:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: the fighting on the first of July went badly for the Union.
• 1:10:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Confederate forces pushed the Union defenders through the streets of Gettysburg and back to the high ground south and east of town, a ridge called Cemetery Ridge and a hill called Culp's Hill.
• 1:10:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was a partial Confederate success, but the Union forces had found the high ground and that
• 1:11:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: The commander of the army of the Potomac, General George Meade, had only recently been appointed and had ridden through the night to take command of a battle already in progress.
• 1:11:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: He surveyed the position at Cemetery Ridge and decided to hold it.
• 1:11:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: His army occupied a fish hook-shaped line along the high ground.
• 1:11:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lee ordered attacks on both flanks.
• 1:11:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: On July 2nd, Confederate General James Long Street attacked the Union left flank across a landscape of wheat fields and peach orchards and a tangle of massive boulders called Devil's Den.
• 1:11:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: The fighting there was some of the most savage of the entire battle.
• 1:11:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: A union officer named Joshua Chamberlain commanded the 20th main infantry on a hill called Little Round Top at the extreme left-end of the union line.
• 1:12:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: His regiment ran out of ammunition late in the afternoon, and Chamberlain rather than retreating.
• 1:12:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: ordered a bayonet charge down hill into the Confederate troops below.
• 1:12:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: The charge caught the Confederates by surprise drove them back and saved the Union's left flank.
• 1:12:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chamberlain would receive the Medal of Honor for it.
• 1:12:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: At the other end of the Union line, Confederate forces under General Richard Eul attempted to seize Culp's hill and cemetery hill, but were repulsed in confused fighting that lasted into the night.
• 1:12:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lee had attacked both ends of the Union line and had not broken through either one.
• 1:12:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: On July 3, Lee decided to attack the centre.
• 1:12:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was a decision that Longstreet opposed
• 1:12:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Union Center on Cemetery Ridge was strongly held.
• 1:12:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: The attack would require a mile-long march across open ground under artillery fire before the infantry even reached the Union line.
• 1:13:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Longstreet argued against it.
• 1:13:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lee insisted.
• 1:13:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: He believed his men could do it.
• 1:13:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: He had seen them do remarkable things.
• 1:13:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: The assault is known as Pickett's Charge, named for General George Pickett, who commanded one of the three divisions that participated in it.
• 1:13:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: Though George Petter grew, an Isaac Trimble, led the others.
• 1:13:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: At approximately three in the afternoon.
• 1:13:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: After a massive confederate artillery bombardment intended to suppress the Union artillery on Cemetery Ridge, 12,000 to 15,000 confederate soldiers stepped out from the tree line and began their advance across the open fields.
• 1:13:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Union artillery had mostly survived the bombardment and opened fire immediately, Confederate soldiers fell by the hundreds.
• 1:14:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Confederate guns fell silent as their ammunition ran low.
• 1:14:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: The March continued.
• 1:14:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Union infantry opened fire.
• 1:14:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: More men fell.
• 1:14:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: The charge faltered, wavered, and then a handful of Confederate soldiers, perhaps a few hundred, actually reached the Union line at a spot that would be called the High Water Mark of the Confederacy.
• 1:14:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: They broke through briefly, was surrounded and were killed or captured.
• 1:14:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: The survivors streamed back across the fields toward the Confederate line.
• 1:14:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lee rode out to meet them.
• 1:14:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: He told them it was his fault.
• 1:14:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: He said it was all his fault.
• 1:14:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: The statement was honest.
• 1:14:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: The attack had been his decision over Longstreet's protests, and it had cost him perhaps 6,000 men in less than an hour.
• 1:14:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: The battle of Gettysburg lasted 3 days, and cost approximately 50,000 casualties on both sides.
• 1:15:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lee's army limped back to Virginia in rain.
• 1:15:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: His supply wagons carrying 12 miles of wounded men.
• 1:15:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: He never successfully invaded the North again, meet to Lincoln's anguished frustration, did not pursue aggressively and learscaped.
• 1:15:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: The president locked himself in his office and wept.
• 1:15:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: But Gettysburg was not the only thing that happened on those same three days in July.
• 1:15:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Since the spring, General Ulysses Grant had been trying to take Vicksburg, Mississippi.
• 1:15:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Vicksburg sat on high bluffs above a sharp bend in the Mississippi River and was the last major confederate stronghold on the river.
• 1:15:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was heavily fortified and had beaten back Union Naval attacks.
• 1:15:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Grant had tried multiple approaches, several of which had failed.
• 1:15:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: His superior, General Henry Hallick in Washington, had little confidence in him.
• 1:16:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Newspaper reporters wrote that Grant was a drunk, incompetent, and should be relieved.
• 1:16:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lincoln kept him in command.
• 1:16:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: In April of 1863 Grant executed one of the most audacious maneuvers of the entire war.
• 1:16:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: He marched his army down the western bank of the Mississippi.
• 1:16:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Ran his supply fleet passed the Vicksburg batteries at night, ferried his army across
• 1:16:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: cut loose from his supply line entirely, and marched inland, living off the land, fighting five battles in 18 days against separate Confederate forces, and then swinging back to besiege Vixberg from the land side.
• 1:16:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was a campaign of speed and maneuver that Napoleon would have admired.
• 1:16:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: The siege of Vicksburg lasted 47 days.
• 1:17:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Confederate General John Pemberton's garrison of 30,000 men held out as food ran low and Union artillery shells fell day and night.
• 1:17:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Soldiers and civilians alike dug caves in the hillsides to shelter from the bombardment.
• 1:17:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Mules, dogs and rats became food.
• 1:17:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: The city endured
• 1:17:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: but it could not endure forever.
• 1:17:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: On July 4th, 1863, the day after Pickett's charge, John Pemberton surrendered Vicksburg to Ulysses Grant.
• 1:17:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Grant, peralled the Confederate Garrison, rather than sending 30,000 prisoners north, a practical decision that added to his reputation for generous terms.
• 1:17:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Five days later, Port Hudson in Louisiana, the last Confederate position on the Mississippi, also fell.
• 1:17:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: The river, as Lincoln put it, went unvexed to the sea.
• 1:18:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Confederacy had been cut in half.
• 1:18:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas, were now effectively separated from the rest of the Confederate states.
• 1:18:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lincoln in a letter to Grant after Vicksburg admitted that he had not thought Grant's plan could work.
• 1:18:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: He wrote that he was wrong, and Grant was right.
• 1:18:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was a letter of almost unprecedented grace from a president to a general, and it was the beginning of an important partnership.
• 1:18:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: While all of this was happening in Pennsylvania and Mississippi, a different kind of crisis was erupting in New York City.
• 1:18:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Union Army needed men, volunteering had slowed as the war dragged on and casualties mounted.
• 1:18:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: In March of 1863, Congress passed the Enrollment Act, the first true military draft in American history.
• 1:19:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Every male citizen between 20 and 45 was subject to conscription.
• 1:19:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: But there was a provision that infuriated the poor.
• 1:19:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: A man could hire a substitute to serve in his place
• 1:19:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Roughly equivalent to a year's wages for a laboring man.
• 1:19:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Rich men could buy their way out, the poor could not.
• 1:19:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: New York City was a city of enormous Irish immigrant population.
• 1:19:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Working class, poor, already competing with free black workers for jobs at the bottom of the economic ladder.
• 1:19:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: and deeply hostile to the war and to abolition.
• 1:19:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: On July 13th, 1863, the day the first draft lottery was to be held in the city, a mob attacked the draft office on 3rd Avenue and burned it to the ground.
• 1:20:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: What followed over the next four days was some of the worst urban violence in American history.
• 1:20:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: The rioters were mostly Irish working class men, though women participated as well.
• 1:20:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: They were attacking not just the draft, but everything they associated with it.
• 1:20:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: the Republican Party, wealthy men who could afford substitutes the police and most terribly black New Yorkers.
• 1:20:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: The rioters targeted the black community with murderous ferocity, burning the colored orphan asylum on 5th Avenue with 233 children inside, who escaped with their lives
• 1:20:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: They hunted down black men in the streets, beat them, and lynched at least 11.
• 1:20:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: They torched the homes and businesses of black New Yorkers throughout Manhattan.
• 1:21:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: The violence required the deployment of troops.
• 1:21:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some of them rushed directly from Gettysburg to restore order.
• 1:21:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: By the time it was over, somewhere between 100 and 1000 and 2000 people had died.
• 1:21:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: The estimates vary widely because much of the killing was never officially recorded.
• 1:21:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was a reminder that the war for the Union was not universally popular in the north, and that racial hatred was not a purely southern phenomenon.
• 1:21:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: The November of 1863 brought another moment that would last forever.
• 1:21:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lincoln travelled to Gettysburg in November to speak at the dedication of a national cemetery on the battlefield.
• 1:21:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was not the featured speaker.
• 1:21:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: That honour went to Edward Everett of Massachusetts, the greatest honour of the age, who delivered a two-hour address of magnificent period eloquence.
• 1:22:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lincoln spoke for about two minutes.
• 1:22:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: He delivered 272 words.
• 1:22:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: He said that the nation had been conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
• 1:22:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: He said the living could not consecrate the ground, the brave men who died there had already consecrated it.
• 1:22:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: He said the nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom.
• 1:22:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Ever it wrote to Lincoln the next day that he wished he could have come as close to the central idea of the occasion in two hours, as Lincoln had in two minutes.
• 1:22:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lincoln's own secretary, John Niccolay, wrote that Lincoln had delivered the address badly.
• 1:22:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: only later would it become clear that Lincoln had delivered in those two minutes, perhaps the most important piece of prose in American history.
• 1:23:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chapter 6 Grant Sherman and the Hard War 1864.
• 1:23:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: In March of 1864, Lincoln called Ulysses Grant to Washington and gave him command of all Union armies.
• 1:23:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was a promotion Grant had never sought and did not relish in the political sense.
• 1:23:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was not comfortable in Washington.
• 1:23:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: He did not enjoy the dinners and the ceremonies and the intrigue of the capital.
• 1:23:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: He wanted to get back to the war.
• 1:23:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Grant's strategy for winning the war was simple in conception and brutal in execution.
• 1:23:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: He would use the Union's superior resources to apply simultaneous pressure on all Confederate armies everywhere, so they could not reinforce each other or recover from defeats.
• 1:24:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: He would make the cost of continuing the war greater than the South's will to bear it.
• 1:24:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: He would, if necessary, destroy not just Confederate armies, but the Confederate capacity to make war.
• 1:24:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: its railroads, its crops, its factories, its supply lines, and if necessary, it's civilian sense that they were safe.
• 1:24:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Grant would command the main eastern theatre personally, his head quarters traveling with the army of the Potomac.
• 1:24:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: William to comes a Sherman, his most trusted subordinate, would command in the west, with orders to drive into Georgia and take it
• 1:24:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: the Ovaland campaign began on May 4th, 1864, when the army of the Potomac crossed the rapid ant river into northern Virginia and moved into a dense second-growth forest known as the wilderness.
• 1:25:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lee knew they were coming, he chose to meet them there rather than on open ground, because in the wilderness the unions enormous advantage in artillery would be neutralised.
• 1:25:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: The trees were so thick that cavalry was useless, vision was limited to yards rather than miles, and units quickly became disoriented and separated.
• 1:25:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: The battle of the wilderness lasted two days, May 5th and 6th.
• 1:25:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was fighting unlike anything either Army had previously experienced.
• 1:25:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Men fired at enemies they could not see, guided only by the sound of their voices or the smoke of their muskets.
• 1:25:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Units marched into each other in the dense undergrowth, both sides firing wildly.
• 1:25:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: The dead brush caught fire, and wounded men who could not move burned alive.
• 1:25:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: The screaming was audible for miles.
• 1:26:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Grant lost 17,000 men in two days,
• 1:26:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Every previous army of the Potomac commander, after a bloody repulse by Lee, had retreated back across the river to regroup.
• 1:26:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Grant turned south and kept moving.
• 1:26:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: He reached Spotsalvania courthouse before Lee and had to fight his way through fortified Confederate positions for 12 days in some of the most grueling combat of the entire war.
• 1:26:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: At a section of the Confederate Earthworks called the Muleshu on May 12th,
• 1:26:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Union troops captured the salient in a dawn assault, and fighting continued hand-to-hand at the trench line for nearly 20 hours without stopping.
• 1:26:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Men stood on opposite sides of a log-brest work and stabbed at each other with bayonets.
• 1:26:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Trees behind the Confederate line were cut down by musket fire alone.
• 1:27:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Grant lost 12,000 men at Spotsalvania in 12 days.
• 1:27:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: He kept moving, at cold harbour on June 3rd, Grant made the mistake of his campaign.
• 1:27:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: He ordered a frontal assault on heavily fortified Confederate positions after inadequate reconnaissance, and in the first hour of fighting, he lost approximately 7,000 men, soldiers pinned their names and home addresses to their coats before the assault, so their bodies could be identified.
• 1:27:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: After Cold Harbor, Grant later wrote that he regretted the assault more than any other of his career.
• 1:27:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Grant lost 50,000 men in six weeks.
• 1:27:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: The casualty figures horrified the north.
• 1:27:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Newspapers called him a butcher.
• 1:27:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lincoln's advisors warned him that the losses were politically unsustainable.
• 1:27:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Critics called for grants removal.
• 1:28:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lincoln refused.
• 1:28:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: He said he could not spare this man.
• 1:28:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: He fought, but the arithmetic of the campaign was not what it appeared.
• 1:28:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lee had lost perhaps 30,000 men in the same period.
• 1:28:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: a proportion of his force, he absolutely could not replace.
• 1:28:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Grant could replace his losses from a vast northern population.
• 1:28:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: The army of northern Virginia could not.
• 1:28:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: By mid-June, Grant had moved his army to the James River, and was besieging Peter's Burg Virginia, the railroad hub south of Richmond, through which nearly all of the Confederate capital supplies passed.
• 1:28:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lee dug in, the siege of Petersburg would last nine months.
• 1:28:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Meanwhile, far to the southwest, William Sherman was moving through Georgia.
• 1:28:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sherman was one of the war's most interesting figures.
• 1:29:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was Lee, nervous, compulsively energetic, with wild reddish hair and a manner of speaking that came in rapid brilliant bursts.
• 1:29:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: He had suffered a breakdown early in the war and had been briefly relieved of command when newspaper reports described him as insane.
• 1:29:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: He had come back, served effectively under Grant at Shiloh and in the Vicksburg campaign.
• 1:29:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: and had developed a bond with Grant, based on mutual trust, and a shared understanding of what the war required.
• 1:29:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: What the war required, Sherman believed, was making it personal for the people who supported it.
• 1:29:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Confederate armies could not be destroyed simply by fighting them.
• 1:29:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: The will of the southern people to sustain those armies had to be broken.
• 1:29:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: that meant making war not just on soldiers, but on the infrastructure and economy that supported them.
• 1:30:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sherman began his advance from Chattanooga, Tennessee, in May of 1864, with roughly 100,000 men organised into three armies.
• 1:30:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Facing him was Confederate General Joseph
• 1:30:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Johnston was a careful, defensive general, who understood he could not match Sherman in open battle.
• 1:30:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: He retreated slowly southward, fighting at every defensible position, trying to make Sherman's advance as costly as possible, buying time, and hoping that northern war weariness would eventually produce a peace settlement.
• 1:30:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sherman maneuvered rather than assaulted, repeatedly threatening Johnston's flanks and forcing him back.
• 1:30:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was a campaign of movement and maneuver, and it consumed the summer.
• 1:30:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: By July, Johnston had been pushed all the way back to the outskirts of Atlanta.
• 1:31:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Jefferson Davis had no patience for Johnston's retreat.
• 1:31:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: He replaced him with general John Bell Hood, an aggressive Texas general who had lost a leg at Chikomorga and an arm at Gettysburg and who was known for attacking rather than defending.
• 1:31:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was the decision Davis wanted to make and almost certainly the wrong one.
• 1:31:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Hood attacked Sherman three times in the space of two weeks and lost perhaps 15,000 men he could not afford to lose.
• 1:31:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Atlanta was besieged.
• 1:31:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: On September 2nd, 1864, Atlanta fell to Sherman's forces.
• 1:31:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: The timing was crucial.
• 1:31:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: the summer had been disastrous in terms of public perception in the north.
• 1:31:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: Grant appeared to be grinding up men at cold harbour and getting nowhere.
• 1:32:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sherman appeared to be stalled in Georgia, Lincoln himself expected to lose the election.
• 1:32:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: He wrote a memorandum in August, predicting that he would lose and asking his cabinet to sign the sealed envelope without reading it, as evidence that he had prepared for
• 1:32:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Democratic nominee, George McLellan, whom Lincoln had removed from command in November of 1862, ran on a platform that called for a negotiated peace.
• 1:32:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Atlanta's fall changed everything.
• 1:32:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: The North erupted in celebration.
• 1:32:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Union was winning after all.
• 1:32:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lincoln's reelection became possible, then likely, then certain.
• 1:32:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: He won in November by a comfortable margin in the Electoral College, carrying 22 of 25 Union states.
• 1:33:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: The peace movement was defeated at the ballot box, and the war would be forced to its conclusion.
• 1:33:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: After Atlanta, Sherman proposed something even more radical.
• 1:33:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: He would cut loose from his supply line entirely, leave a force to hold Atlanta and march southeast with 60,000 men to the sea.
• 1:33:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: He would live off the land as he went, cut a swath, sixty miles wide through the heart of Georgia, destroying everything of military value, and a great deal else besides, and reach the port of Savannah on the Atlantic coast.
• 1:33:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: He would demonstrate to the southern people that their government could not protect them, that the Confederacy was hollow.
• 1:33:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sherman destroyed what remained of Atlantis' rail infrastructure and supplied depots, sent the civilian population away, and on November 15, 1864, his army marched out of the burning city and disappeared into Georgia.
• 1:34:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sherman's march to the sea lasted approximately six weeks.
• 1:34:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: His force is moved in four parallel columns at a pace of about 10-15 miles per day, not particularly fast, but methodical and relentless.
• 1:34:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: They tore up railroad tracks, heating the rails over fires and bending them around trees into what soldiers called Sherman's Neckties.
• 1:34:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: They burned warehouses, grist mills, cotton gins, and any facility that could support the confederate war effort.
• 1:34:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: They helped themselves liberally to food from southern farms and plantations.
• 1:34:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: They destroyed what they could not carry.
• 1:34:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: The rules of conduct for what could and could not be taken or destroyed were specific in Sherman's official orders.
• 1:34:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: were regularly violated, foraging parties, nicknamed Bummers, often went beyond their orders, looting personal property, burning houses that were not supposed to be burned, terrorizing civilians.
• 1:35:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: The personal violence was generally not as extreme,
• 1:35:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: as Confederate accounts later claimed, but it was real and it was frightening.
• 1:35:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sherman did not discourage it excessively, that was, in part, the point.
• 1:35:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: What Sherman's March also did was liberate enslaved people by the tens of thousands.
• 1:35:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: As his army passed through, enslaved men and women abandoned the plantations in enormous numbers and followed the army.
• 1:35:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: By the time Sherman reached Savannah in late December, he had a column of tens of thousands of freed people following his army, which created enormous logistical problems.
• 1:36:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some of his generals were openly hostile to this mass emancipation.
• 1:36:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sherman himself was not particularly sympathetic to black people in the conventional 19th century sense, but he understood the military value of depriving the confederacy of enslaved labour.
• 1:36:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Savannah fell on December 21st.
• 1:36:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sherman telegraphed Lincoln, presenting him the city as a Christmas gift.
• 1:36:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lincoln wrote back, expressing delight, and something close to wonder at what Sherman had
• 1:36:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the war was entering its final phase.
• 1:36:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chapter 7 The Men At the Centre We have been moving through events at some speed and I want to slow down here because the civil war was not ultimately about tactics or logistics or political maneuvering, though it was about all of those things.
• 1:37:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was about human beings, specific people in specific moments, making choices that changed the world.
• 1:37:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let me spend some time with a few of them, Abraham Lincoln.
• 1:37:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was born on February 12th, 1809, in a log cabin in Kentucky, which is a sentence so familiar it has lost its weight, but think about what that actually meant.
• 1:37:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: He grew up in frontier poverty, in a one-room cabin with a dirt floor and a sleeping loft.
• 1:37:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: His mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln, died when he was nine years old from milk sickness.
• 1:37:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: A disease caused by drinking milk from cows that had eaten a poisonous plant.
• 1:37:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: His father, Thomas Lincoln, remarried a woman named Sarah Bush-Johnston, who Lincoln adored and who encouraged his education.
• 1:38:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: He attended school by his own account for less than a year in total.
• 1:38:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: He educated himself, reading by firelight, walking miles to borrow books.
• 1:38:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: He worked as a boatman, a store clerk, a surveyor, and a postmaster while teaching himself law.
• 1:38:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: He read Blackstone's commentaries on the laws of England, the basic legal text of the era by himself with no teacher.
• 1:38:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: he was admitted to the Illinois Bar in 1836.
• 1:38:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: He served in the Illinois State Legislature, then one term in the United States Congress then went back to practicing law and spring field, the State Capital.
• 1:38:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was a successful lawyer, excellent in court, known for his story telling and his humor and his ability to connect with ordinary people.
• 1:38:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was deeply melancholic by nature, what he called the hypo, what we might call depression.
• 1:39:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: He had periods of deep despondency that alarmed those around him.
• 1:39:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was not by any conventional measure, the kind of man who becomes president.
• 1:39:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: He had no great education, no family connections, no great wealth.
• 1:39:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was awkward and physically unusual.
• 1:39:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Six feet four inches tall with enormous hands and an angular face that contemporary photographs capture in ways that are hard to categorize as conventionally handsome.
• 1:39:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: He told jokes compulsively, often at moments of enormous tension to the bafflement and occasional exasperation of the men around him.
• 1:39:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was in the ways that matter almost entirely self-made, and then the war came to him, or he came to the war, and something extraordinary happened.
• 1:39:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: He grew into the presidency in a way that almost no one predicted and that still seems remarkable.
• 1:40:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: He grew not by becoming harder or more ruthless, but by becoming deeper, more capacious, more able to hold together contradictions and keep moving forward.
• 1:40:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: He learned how to fire generals he liked and promote ones he didn't.
• 1:40:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: He learned how to handle the enormous egos of the men in his cabinet, men like Secretary of State Seward and Treasury Secretary Sam and Chase, who each thought they should be president themselves.
• 1:40:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: He learned how to write prose of extraordinary power and economy.
• 1:40:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: His second inaugural address delivered in March of 1865 with the war nearly over is by some measures the finest speech ever given by an American president.
• 1:40:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: He spoke of malice towards none and charity for all of binding up the nation's wounds.
• 1:41:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: He acknowledged in plain language
• 1:41:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: that slavery was the cause of the war, and that both North and South shared in the guilt of its long continuance.
• 1:41:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: He did not gloat, he did not condemn, he looked forward with an almost heartbreaking combination of clarity and grace.
• 1:41:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was shot five days after Lee's surrender, Robert E. Lee.
• 1:41:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lee was born in January 1807 into the Virginia aristocracy, the son of Lighthorse Harry Lee, a revolutionary war hero who had since fallen into debt and disgrace.
• 1:41:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Robert grew up in Gentile poverty, his father's example, a warning rather than an inspiration.
• 1:41:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: He worked his way into West Point on Merit, graduated second in his class in 1829, without a single-demerit in four years, and became one of the finest engineers in the army.
• 1:42:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: He served brilliantly in the Mexican-American War under General Winfield Scott, who called him the greatest soldier I ever saw in the field.
• 1:42:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lee was offered command of the Union Army in April of 1861, he agonized over the decision.
• 1:42:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: He wrote that he could take no part in an invasion of the southern states.
• 1:42:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: and that he felt himself compelled to return to his home state of Virginia.
• 1:42:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: He said he hoped to do nothing dishonorable.
• 1:42:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: He accepted Confederate command almost immediately after resigning his United States Commission.
• 1:42:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: On the battlefield, Lee was a genius of a particular kind.
• 1:42:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: He had an extraordinary ability to read terrain, to understand what his opponent was likely to do, and to take calculated risks that defied conventional military reasoning.
• 1:43:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: He consistently fought with disadvantaged forces against larger Union armies and frequently one.
• 1:43:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chancellor'sville, second ball run, Fredericksburg.
• 1:43:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: These were battles in which lesser-general ship would have meant defeat, but Lee was also something that the lost cause mythology that grew up around him after the war worked very hard to obscure.
• 1:43:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was the commander of an army fighting explicitly to preserve the institution of slavery.
• 1:43:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: He owned enslaved people himself and managed the Arlington estate he had inherited through marriage with a documented harshness.
• 1:43:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: When a group of enslaved people attempted to escape from Arlington in 1859, the year of John Brown's raid,
• 1:44:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lee had them caught and had two of them whipped while he watched.
• 1:44:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was not a passive beneficiary of the institution.
• 1:44:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was an active participant.
• 1:44:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: The attempt after the war to portray Lee as a man who opposed slavery but fought for Virginia out of loyalty.
• 1:44:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: And to transform the Confederate
• 1:44:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: began almost immediately after apomattox.
• 1:44:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lee participated in this effort himself, saying in later years that he had never been in favor of succession and that slavery was a moral and political evil.
• 1:44:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: his wartime letters and conduct tell a more complicated story.
• 1:44:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: None of this means Lee was not a person of genuine qualities.
• 1:44:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was.
• 1:44:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was loved by his men with an intensity that was real and deeply moving.
• 1:45:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: He bore the weight of enormous losses with apparent composure.
• 1:45:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was, by nearly all accounts, gracious and dignified in defeat, but he was also a man who devoted his exceptional abilities to a cause defined by its own founding documents as the preservation of racial slavery.
• 1:45:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: and the truth about him requires holding both things together.
• 1:45:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Ulysses S. Grant.
• 1:45:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Grant was born higher in Ulysses Grant in Point Pleasant, Ohio, in April of 1822, the Sun of a Tannin.
• 1:45:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: He went to West Point through a congressman's appointment.
• 1:45:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: and graduated in 1843, a competent but unremarkable student.
• 1:45:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: He served in the Mexican-American War with distinction.
• 1:46:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Then spent several years at peacetime army posts in the Pacific Northwest and California, where, by various accounts, he drank heavily and was desperately lonely and unhappy.
• 1:46:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: He resigned his commission in 1854 under circumstances that were never entirely clear, but almost certainly involved a drinking problem and pressure from his commanding officer.
• 1:46:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: The years between 1854 and 1861 were a series of failures.
• 1:46:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: He tried farming and could barely feed his family.
• 1:46:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: He tried real estate and failed.
• 1:46:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: He tried build collecting.
• 1:46:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: He ended up working in his father's leather goods store in Galena, Illinois for a salary at the age of 38.
• 1:46:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: in a job he found humiliating.
• 1:46:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: When the war broke out, he volunteered immediately, was given command of an Illinois regiment, and within months had revealed himself as exactly the kind of general the union desperately needed, cool under pressure.
• 1:47:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Logistically
• 1:47:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: Grant was a complicated man who is often flattened by history into a simple one.
• 1:47:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was not simply a butcher who won by throwing men at Confederate positions.
• 1:47:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: his campaigns at Vixberg and in the Ovaland Campaign were those of a commander of genuine strategic sophistication.
• 1:47:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was also a genuinely kind man in many personal respects, gentle with his children and deeply devoted to his wife Julia.
• 1:47:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was honest to a fault, which later made him a poor president,
• 1:47:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: because he trusted men who took advantage of him.
• 1:47:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: He wrote his memoirs in the last year of his life, as he was dying of throat cancer, racing to finish them to provide for his family, and produced one of the finest military memoirs in the English language.
• 1:48:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: Frederick Douglass.
• 1:48:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Douglas was born into slavery in Talbot County, Maryland, in approximately 1818.
• 1:48:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: The year uncertain because enslaved people were often not told their own birthdays.
• 1:48:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: His mother, Harriet Bailey, was enslaved.
• 1:48:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: His father was almost certainly a white man, possibly his end slaver.
• 1:48:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was separated from his mother as an infant, and rarely saw her before she died when he was approximately seven years old.
• 1:48:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: He taught himself to read as a child with extraordinary determination, trading bread to white boys for reading lessons, studying the pages of a book called The Columbian Orator.
• 1:48:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was sent to Baltimore as a young man to work in a household, which gave him access to an urban environment where he learned from free black people and where his sharp, restless mind had more room to operate.
• 1:49:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: In September of 1838, he escaped, boarding a train with forged papers identifying him as a free black sailor.
• 1:49:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: He made his way to New York and then to New Bedford, Massachusetts.
• 1:49:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Within three years of his escape, Douglas was speaking publicly about his experiences before abolitionist audiences.
• 1:49:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: His bearing, his intelligence, and the force of his speaking were so extraordinary that some people claimed he could not possibly have been enslaved because he was clearly too educated and too articulate.
• 1:49:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 1845, to prove his story was true, he published his autobiography, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.
• 1:50:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: He named his former enslavers and describes specific incidents.
• 1:50:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: He knew that publishing the book made his recapture under the fugitive slave act possible, but he did it anyway.
• 1:50:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: He went to Britain for two years, where he lectured widely, and raised money to purchase his formal legal freedom, which was accomplished in 1846.
• 1:50:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Douglas returned to the United States and founded a newspaper, the North Star in Rochester, New York.
• 1:50:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: He became the most powerful black voice in America, equally capable of moving audiences to tears or to outrage.
• 1:50:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: with complicated relationships to both the abolitionist movement and the Republican party.
• 1:50:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes aligning with them and sometimes criticizing them sharply.
• 1:50:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: He met with Lincoln in the White House in 1863, and again in 1864, and each meeting seems to have affected both men.
• 1:51:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: He pushed Lincoln publicly and privately, to do more than Lincoln initially wanted to do, to arm black soldiers, to commit more fully to emancipation, to recognize the full humanity
• 1:51:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: He knew that Lincoln was a political man operating within a political system, and he worked to that knowledge strategically.
• 1:51:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: After Lincoln's death
• 1:51:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Douglas gave a speech at the dedication of the freed men's memorial monuments in Washington, in which he was both honest about Lincoln's limitations and genuine in his grief.
• 1:51:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: He called Lincoln emphatically the white man's president, fully loyal to the white race.
• 1:51:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: He also said that Lincoln was the first great man that I talked with in the United States freely, who in no single instance reminded me of the difference between himself and myself.
• 1:52:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then, there were the soldiers.
• 1:52:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: There were approximately 2.5 million men in the Union Army over the course of the war, and approximately 1 million in the Confederate Army.
• 1:52:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: They ranged in age from boys of 15 and 16 who lied about their ages to men in their 50s who lied in the opposite direction.
• 1:52:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: They came from every background imaginable, farmers and clerks, immigrants from Germany and Ireland and the dozen other countries.
• 1:52:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Men who had never been more than 20 miles from their hometown, and men who had already sailed around the world.
• 1:52:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: The average soldier was in his mid-twenties, had some basic education, and had never fired a weapon in anger before the war.
• 1:53:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: They wrote letters home with an almost desperate frequency.
• 1:53:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: The letters are the most immediate records of the war that survive.
• 1:53:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Full of the small details that larger histories leave out.
• 1:53:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: The quality of the food, which was generally terrible, heart attack crackers so hard they had to be soaked in water or coffee before they could be eaten without breaking teeth.
• 1:53:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Saltpork that sometimes arrived rotten.
• 1:53:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Coffee that the soldiers drank in enormous quantities and missed terribly when they couldn't get it.
• 1:53:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: The mud, the soldiers wrote endlessly about the mud.
• 1:53:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: A Virginia winter turned every road and every camp into a sea of clinging, sucking mud that exhausted men and animals and stopped armies in their tracks.
• 1:53:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: They wrote about the fear.
• 1:54:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: the specific practical fear of going into battle, which was different from anything they had expected.
• 1:54:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: One soldier described how perfectly calm and rational he had felt, while bullets were flying past him, and how completely unable to eat he was for the three days before a battle.
• 1:54:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Another described how he had spent the night before his first engagement, sitting on a
• 1:54:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: and trying to decide what to say.
• 1:54:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Many of them described a curious numbness that descended in actual combat.
• 1:54:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: A kind of tunnel vision that focused them entirely on the immediate task while the larger horror went on around them.
• 1:54:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: They also wrote about what they believed they were fighting for and on both sides the language of duty, honor and home appears constantly.
• 1:54:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Confederate soldiers wrote about fighting to defend Virginia or Mississippi or their particular county, their family farm, their way of life.
• 1:55:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Union soldiers wrote about fighting for the Union, for the principle of democratic government.
• 1:55:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: for the constitution.
• 1:55:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: As the war went on and the emancipation proclamation changed the official war aims, a significant number of union soldiers wrote home, expressing discomfort or outright opposition to fighting for black freedom.
• 1:55:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: an equally significant and growing number, wrote with increasing conviction that the war had to settle the slavery question once and for all, or it would all have been for nothing.
• 1:55:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: They were hungry, they were cold, they were sick, and disease killed twice as many soldiers as combat did.
• 1:55:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Dissentry was everywhere, along with typhoid fever and pneumonia, a soldier who survived a wound might still die of infection weeks later.
• 1:56:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: The hospitals were places of horror, with surgeons performing amputations by the dozen, to stop the spread of infection, and the piles of limbs outside field hospital tents became one of the war's most searing images.
• 1:56:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: and then they got up the next morning and marched forward anyway.
• 1:56:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chapter eight, the end and the aftermath.
• 1:56:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: By the early months of 1865, the Confederate cause was visibly dying.
• 1:56:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sherman had completed his march to the sea and turned north through the Carolinas, cutting deeper into the
• 1:56:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Confederate army trying to stop him, commanded by the restored Joseph Johnston, was too small and too worn down, city after city fell.
• 1:57:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Columbia, South Carolina, burned in February of 1865, under circumstances that are still debated by historians, with union soldiers, Confederate evacuees,
• 1:57:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Wilmington, North Carolina, the last major confederate port, fell.
• 1:57:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sherman's Army moved relentlessly northward.
• 1:57:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: In Virginia, Grant's siege of Peter's Burg had been going on since June of 1864.
• 1:57:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: By the spring of 1865, Lee's army was down to perhaps 50,000 poorly fed.
• 1:57:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Poorly equipped men holding a line of trenches 37 miles long against Grant's force of nearly 150,000.
• 1:57:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Desersion was epidemic in the Confederate army.
• 1:58:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Men who had fought brilliantly for four years were simply leaving.
• 1:58:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: slipping away in the night and walking home to families they had not seen in months or years.
• 1:58:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: They could see which way things were going.
• 1:58:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lee knew he had to break out of Peter'sburg or surrender.
• 1:58:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: On April 1st, 1865, Union forces under Philip Sheridan cut off the last railroad, supplying Peter'sburg at a crossroads called Five Forks.
• 1:58:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lee's position was untenable.
• 1:58:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: On the night of April 2nd, he ordered the evacuation of both Petersburg and Richmond, and Jefferson Davis received the message during services at St. Paul's Church in Richmond, and was seen to leave the church quietly.
• 1:58:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: By morning, Confederate troops were abandoning their trenches and pouring westward and Davis and his cabinet were on a train heading south.
• 1:59:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: The fall of Richmond was a scene of extraordinary dramatic power.
• 1:59:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Confederate forces burned warehouses and supply depots as they left and the fires spread to much of the city's business district.
• 1:59:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: the sky over Richmond glowed orange in the night.
• 1:59:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: On April 3rd, Union soldiers marched into the Confederate capital.
• 1:59:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Among the first Union troops to enter the city was a regiment of black soldiers.
• 1:59:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: The 28th United States colored troops who were greeted by the city's black residents with scenes of overwhelming emotion.
• 1:59:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Freedom had come to Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy.
• 1:59:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Two days later, Abraham Lincoln visited Richmond.
• 1:59:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: He walked through the streets with a small escort, a companyed by his young son, Tad.
• 1:59:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: black residents of the city mobbed him, wept, fell to their knees.
• 2:00:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lincoln, visibly moved, asked them to stand.
• 2:00:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: He visited the Confederate executive mansion, the White House of the Confederacy, and sat briefly in Jefferson Davis's chair.
• 2:00:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: He said nothing publicly about the symbolism.
• 2:00:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: He didn't need to.
• 2:00:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lee was moving west with what remained of the Army of
• 2:00:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: approximately 30,000 men, trying to reach the railroad at Danville and link up with Johnston's Army in North Carolina for a continued guerrilla resistance.
• 2:00:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Grant pursued relentlessly.
• 2:00:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sheridan's cavalry cut off Lee's route repeatedly at a place called Salars Creek on April 6th, a quarter
• 2:00:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lee, watching the disaster from a hillside, is reported to have said quietly that my God has the army dissolved.
• 2:01:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: It had very nearly.
• 2:01:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: By April 8th,
• 2:01:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: The army was surrounded on three sides, with Sheridan blocking the road ahead and Grant pressing from behind.
• 2:01:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: On the morning of April 9th, 1865, Lee sent a flag of truce through the lines.
• 2:01:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: He requested a meeting with Grant to discuss the surrender of the army of Northern Virginia.
• 2:01:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: The meeting took place at approximately one-thirty in the afternoon in the parlor of a brick house in the village of Appamatic's courthouse, Virginia.
• 2:01:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: The house belonged to Wilma McLean, who had a remarkable and slightly absurd relationship with the war.
• 2:01:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: McLean had lived near menassus at the time of the first battle of Bull Run.
• 2:01:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: and a Confederate general had actually used his farmhouse as a headquarters during the battle.
• 2:02:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Shell's fell in his yard.
• 2:02:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: He moved his family to the remote village of Appamatics Courthouse, specifically to get away from the fighting, and then the war came to his parlor to end.
• 2:02:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: The two men who met in that parlor were a study in contrasts.
• 2:02:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lee was immaculate in his best dress uniform, with his ceremonial sword at his side.
• 2:02:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was 58 years old and had slept little in days but he carried himself with absolute composure.
• 2:02:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Grant was 42, wearing a mud-stained private coat with his general stars stitched on the shoulders, having ridden hard to reach apimatics.
• 2:02:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: He had a terrible headache that vanished the moment he saw Lee's letter requesting surrender.
• 2:02:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: He later said the sight of Lee, knowing what Lee had given his life to, made him feel rather sad and depressed.
• 2:02:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: There was nothing left in him of triumph.
• 2:03:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: They talked briefly about the Mexican-American war, where both had served before getting to the business at hand.
• 2:03:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Grant wrote out the terms himself.
• 2:03:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lee's officers and men would be parole and allowed to return to their homes.
• 2:03:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: Not yet to be disturbed by United States' authority, so long as they observe their paroles and the laws enforce where they may reside.
• 2:03:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Officers could keep their side arms.
• 2:03:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: All men could keep their horses, because grant recognised that soldiers who were also farmers would need their horses for the spring planting.
• 2:03:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: the army of Northern Virginia was to stack its arms and surrender its flags.
• 2:03:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lee said the terms were more than he had expected.
• 2:03:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: He asked if his men could also keep their private horses and mules.
• 2:03:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: And Grant said yes, that was the spirit of the order.
• 2:03:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lee shook hands with Grant and several of his staff officers and walked out to his horse, traveler, and rode back to what remained of his army.
• 2:04:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: When word of the surrender spread, Union soldiers began firing celebratory solutes and Grant ordered them stopped.
• 2:04:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: He said the Confederates were his countrymen again.
• 2:04:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: He would hear no rejoicing at their defeat.
• 2:04:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was a moment of magnanimity that set the tone he hoped the piece would have.
• 2:04:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lee rode back through his army.
• 2:04:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: His soldiers crowded around him, reaching out to touch his coat, his horse, his hands.
• 2:04:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Men who had fought for four years, wept without shame.
• 2:04:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lee's own composure broke.
• 2:04:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was seen to wipe tears from his eyes.
• 2:04:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: He told them they had fought with great valor, and that they could return home with the satisfaction that they had done their duty.
• 2:04:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: He said goodbye to them in a written order, General Order number nine, that he dictated to an aid, and that many of them carried for the rest of their lives.
• 2:05:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: The rest of the Confederacy did not immediately collapse.
• 2:05:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Jefferson Davis, still fleeing southwood with the remnants of his cabinet and government, issued a proclamation from Danville, Virginia, calling for continued resistance.
• 2:05:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Joseph Johnston surrendered to Sherman in North Carolina on April 26th.
• 2:05:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: Richard Taylor surrendered the last Confederate forces east of the Mississippi on May 4th.
• 2:05:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Edmund Kirby Smith surrendered the trans-Mississippi forces on June 2nd.
• 2:05:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Davis himself was captured in Georgia on May 10th, still in flight.
• 2:05:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: and was imprisoned at Fort Monroe in Virginia for two years before being released on bail, never tried.
• 2:05:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: Five days after apomattox, Abraham Lincoln was shot.
• 2:06:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: On the evening of April 14th, 1865, Lincoln attended a performance at Ford's Theatre on 10th Street in Washington.
• 2:06:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: He had not particularly wanted to go.
• 2:06:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was tired.
• 2:06:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: He told his bodyguard that he didn't feel like going out.
• 2:06:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: but the papers had announced he would be there and he felt an obligation to appear.
• 2:06:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: He sat in the presidential box above the stage with his wife Mary, two guests and a single bodyguard, a Washington police officer named John Parker, who at some point left his post outside the box to find a better seat from which to watch the play.
• 2:06:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: John Wilkes Booth
• 2:06:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: was 26 years old, a successful actor from a famous theatrical family, and a Confederate sympathizer of passionate conviction.
• 2:06:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: He had originally planned to kidnap Lincoln and use him as a bargaining chip
• 2:07:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: to force the release of Confederate prisoners.
• 2:07:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: The plan had fallen apart in March, after apimatics, both changed his plan to assassination.
• 2:07:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: He had spent weeks in Washington, and new Ford's theatre intimately, having performed there many times.
• 2:07:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: He knew the layout of the presidential box.
• 2:07:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: He knew which night Lincoln would be attending.
• 2:07:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: At approximately 10-15 in the evening, both slipped into the presidential box during a moment of laughter in the play.
• 2:07:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: He placed a small pistol against the back of Lincoln's head and fired once.
• 2:07:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: The lead ball entered Lincoln's skull behind the left ear and lodged behind his right eye.
• 2:07:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Both leaped from the box to the stage, catching his spur on the bunting, decorating the box, and landing awkwardly, breaking a small bone in his left leg.
• 2:07:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: He shouted something at the audience.
• 2:08:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Probably six Semper Tyrannis, the Virginia State motto, meaning thus always to tyrants, though in the chaos few could clearly hear him.
• 2:08:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: He ran out through the backstage to a horse waiting in the alley, and rode away.
• 2:08:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: The audience, at first, thought it was part of the play.
• 2:08:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Then the screaming started.
• 2:08:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lincoln was carried from the theatre to a boarding house across the street, to a bedroom in the back where doctors worked through the night and into the morning.
• 2:08:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: He never regained consciousness.
• 2:08:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: At 7-22 in the morning of April 15th, 1865, Abraham Lincoln died.
• 2:08:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was 56 years old.
• 2:08:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: He had freed 4 million people.
• 2:08:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: He had held the United States together through its greatest crisis and he was gone.
• 2:08:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: Edwin Stanton, who had been Lincoln's demanding and sometimes abrasive secretary of war, stood by the bed.
• 2:09:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: He is reported to have said that Lincoln now belong to the ages.
• 2:09:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Stanton was not a sentimental man.
• 2:09:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: But at that moment, he said something true.
• 2:09:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: Booth was hunted down with 12,000 soldiers deployed in the search.
• 2:09:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was found 12 days later hiding in a tobacco barn in Virginia, cornered, and shot when the barn was set on fire, either by himself, or by a union soldier named Boston Corbett, who later claimed God told him to do it.
• 2:09:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: But both died on the porch of the farmhouse, partially paralyzed a few hours later.
• 2:09:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Four of his co-conspirators were tried by a military tribunal and hanged in July of 1865.
• 2:09:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Three others were imprisoned.
• 2:09:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now let us step back and try to account for what the war cost.
• 2:10:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: The best modern estimates of civil war deaths range from approximately 620,000 at the
• 2:10:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: to 750,000 at the high end, depending on how deaths are counted and which records are used.
• 2:10:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some recent scholarship suggests the number may be closer to 750,000 or even higher.
• 2:10:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: At the lower estimate, the Civil War killed more Americans than died in the first World War, the Second World War, Korea, and Vietnam combined.
• 2:10:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: More Americans died in the Civil War than in all other American wars from the revolution to the present day put together.
• 2:10:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: These numbers are almost impossible to comprehend.
• 2:10:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: So let's try to make them more concrete.
• 2:10:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: The United States in 1860 had a population of approximately 31 million people.
• 2:11:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: If the same proportion of the current United States population were to die in a conflict, the number of dead would exceed 7 million people.
• 2:11:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: And deaths are only part of the cost.
• 2:11:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: hundreds of thousands more men were permanently disabled, missing arms, missing legs, missing eyes.
• 2:11:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: The veteran's hospitals of the post-war period were full of men in their 20s and 30s, who would spend the rest of their lives with what we would today recognize as post-traumatic stress disorder.
• 2:11:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Though no one yet had a name for it, the economic destruction in the south was staggering.
• 2:11:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Two thirds of assessed southern wealth had been destroyed.
• 2:11:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: The plantation system was gone.
• 2:11:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: The railroad network had been torn apart.
• 2:12:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Cities had been burned.
• 2:12:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: The entire labor system of the southern economy had been abolished overnight.
• 2:12:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: And 4 million people had been freed.
• 2:12:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is the most important sentence in this entire account, and it deserves to sit by itself for a moment.
• 2:12:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: 4 million human beings, people who had been bought and sold and worked without wages and beaten and raped and had their families torn apart and their names taken from them and their literacy made illegal were free.
• 2:12:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Whatever else the civil war was, it was that, and it was because of them as much as because of any general or politician.
• 2:12:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: They had been resisting slavery for two centuries.
• 2:12:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: They had been running, sabotaging, making due, maintaining their dignity and their families and their faith under conditions
• 2:13:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: of almost unimaginable oppression.
• 2:13:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: When the war came, they moved toward freedom with every resource they had.
• 2:13:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: The 13th Amendment to the Constitution, which abolished slavery permanently and throughout the country, including the border states.
• 2:13:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: was passed by Congress in January of 1865 and ratified by the states in December of that year, eight months after the war ended, and then came Reconstruction.
• 2:13:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Reconstruction is the word historians use for the period
• 2:13:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: from roughly 1865 to 1877.
• 2:13:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: The years during which the federal government attempted to reintegrate the former Confederate states into the Union and to establish the legal and political rights of 4 million formally enslaved people.
• 2:13:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was a period of extraordinary possibility and ultimately of tragedy.
• 2:14:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the years, immediately after the war, under what historians call radical reconstruction, the federal government took an active role in protecting black rights in the south.
• 2:14:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Black men were enfranchised by the 14th and 15th amendments to the constitution.
• 2:14:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Black men were elected to state legislatures to the United States House of Representatives and to the United States Senate.
• 2:14:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Two Black men from Mississippi, Hiram Rebels and Blanche Bruce, served as United States Senators.
• 2:14:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: The South's public school systems, which had barely existed before the war, were built during reconstruction, largely by
• 2:14:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: Friedman's Bureau agents distributed food, helped establish schools, and attempted to mediate labor disputes between former enslaved people and former enslavers.
• 2:15:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: It did not last.
• 2:15:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: The resistance to black freedom and black political power in the South was violent and sustained.
• 2:15:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Ku Klux Klann was founded in Tennessee in 1865, initially as a social organization for
• 2:15:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: and quickly became a terrorist organization targeting black people.
• 2:15:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Their white Republican allies, and anyone who cooperated with reconstruction, clan members and affiliated groups murdered black voters, burned black schools and churches, and drove black office holders from their positions by force and terror.
• 2:15:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: The violence was systematic and enormous.
• 2:15:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: the federal government fought back for a time.
• 2:15:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Congress passed the enforcement acts in 1870 and 1871, giving the federal government authority to intervene against clan violence and President Ulysses Grant, elected in 1868, used those powers to suppress the clan in South Carolina with considerable effectiveness.
• 2:16:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: but the political will in the north to maintain an indefinite military occupation of the south was limited.
• 2:16:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Northerners who had supported emancipation were growing exhausted with the constant struggles of reconstruction.
• 2:16:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: The economy of the North was booming, and men wanted to get on with their lives, their businesses, their families.
• 2:16:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: The election of 1876, contested between Republican Brotherford Hayes and Democrat Samuel Tildon.
• 2:16:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: ended in a crisis resolved by a compromise in which Hayes received the disputed electoral votes and the presidency in exchange for the withdrawal of the last federal troops from the south.
• 2:17:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Reconstruction was over.
• 2:17:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: The southern states were left to manage their own affairs.
• 2:17:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: what they did with that freedom was to systematically strip black Americans of nearly every right they had gained.
• 2:17:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: The black codes that southern states began passing in 1865, immediately after the war had already tried to re-establish something close to slavery in legal form.
• 2:17:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: requiring black people to sign labor contracts, prohibiting them from owning property, or testifying and caught against white people, allowing for their imprisonment and forced labor for vague offenses.
• 2:17:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: These codes were struck down by the reconstruction amendments and federal legislation.
• 2:17:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: After 1877, without federal oversight, the South rebuilt its racial hierarchy through different but equally effective mechanisms.
• 2:18:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Literacy tests and poll taxes disfranchised black voters,
• 2:18:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: while technically applying to all voters, though they were applied selectively.
• 2:18:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: The convict leasing system imprisoned black men on minor or invented charges and leased them out to farms and mines in conditions indistinguishable from slavery.
• 2:18:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: lynching the extrajudicial murder of black people by white mobs was widespread and largely unpunished with thousands of documented cases between 1877 and the mid-20th century.
• 2:18:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: A system of racial segregation backed by law and violence.
• 2:18:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: which came to be called Jim Crow, descended on the south, and remained for nearly a century.
• 2:18:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: The lost cause mythology, the story that the Confederacy had been a noble cause about states rights and honour rather than slavery, spread through southern culture in the decades after the war and beyond.
• 2:19:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Confederate monuments were erected in courthouse squares and state capitals.
• 2:19:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Many of them built not in the immediate aftermath of the war, but in the early 20th century, and again in the 1950s and 60s, at moments of renewed racial tension and civil rights agitation.
• 2:19:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: school textbooks in the south were rewritten to portray slavery as a benevolent institution and enslaved people as content.
• 2:19:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Confederacy's own founding documents, which stated plainly that it was created to preserve slavery, were quietly set aside in favor of a more comfortable
• 2:20:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: The battlefield moved from Virginia fields to court house steps, from Pennsylvania hills to polling stations in Alabama and Mississippi and Georgia.
• 2:20:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: The questions the war raised about who counts as an American, who deserves the rights the constitution promises.
• 2:20:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: what it costs to defend those rights against people who would take them away were not answered by Lee's surrender.
• 2:20:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: They became the central questions of American life for the next century and a half.
• 2:20:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: The men who fell at Gettysburg, the men who starved in the trenches at Peter'sburg, the men who followed Sherman through Georgia, the men who followed Lee into Maryland.
• 2:20:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: The women who nurse the wounded in improvised hospitals, the women who ran farms and businesses while their husbands were away, the enslaved people who ran toward union lines and put on union uniforms and changed the meaning of what the union stood for.
• 2:21:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: The freed people who built schools and voted and served in office during reconstruction and were then terrorized back out of them, and the ones who kept fighting through the long decades of the Jim Crow era, refusing to accept that the war's promise was permanently broken.
• 2:21:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: All of them are part of this story.
• 2:21:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: and none of them are finished with us yet.
• 2:21:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Close to 650,000 to 750,000 people died in the American Civil War.
• 2:21:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: The precise number will never be known, because in the carnage of the conflict, countless men were buried in unmarked graves.
• 2:21:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Their names unrecorded, their families never notified.
• 2:21:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: young men from Georgia and New York and Illinois and Virginia who had whole lives ahead of them.
• 2:22:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: who had people who loved them, who had plans and dreams and the ordinary futures of ordinary people.
• 2:22:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: They are gone, and the world they made for us is the one we still live in.
• 2:22:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Still arguing about what it owes to the people it failed.
• 2:22:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Still trying to make good on promises that were made and broken and made again.
• 2:22:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Still living with the weight of what was done and what was left undone in those four terrible necessary transformative years, the firebell rings on.
• 2:22:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that brings us to the end of tonight's episode.
• 2:22:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: We have been a long time together, you and I, moving through the years from the cotton fields of the anti-bellum south to the parlor of
• 2:23:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: where two tired men in a Virginia village tried to put something enormous to rest.
• 2:23:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: I hope it was worth the journey.
• 2:23:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Civil War is one of those subjects that never quite feels finished, no matter how long you spend with it.
• 2:23:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: There is always another letter to read, another face to remember, another question to sit within the dark.
• 2:23:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: If tonight has given you some of those questions, then it has done what it was supposed to do.
• 2:23:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for spending your night with Sleepless History.
• 2:23:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you found tonight's episode valuable, please leave a review.
• 2:23:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Share it with someone who loves history and subscribes so you don't miss what's coming next.
• 2:23:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: We'll be here whenever you need something quiet to learn and relax too.
• 2:23:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Until next time, let the weight of the day fall away.
• 2:23:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: You've earned some rest.
• 2:24:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Good night.